


Love

by thequidditchpitch_archivist



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Drabble, Romance, Second War with Voldemort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-02-20
Updated: 2008-02-20
Packaged: 2018-10-27 16:13:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10812465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thequidditchpitch_archivist/pseuds/thequidditchpitch_archivist
Summary: Seamus learns what love means over the years.





	Love

**Author's Note:**

> Note from Annie, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [The Quidditch Pitch](http://fanlore.org/wiki/The_Quidditch_Pitch), which went offline in 2015 when the hosting expired, at a time I was not able to renew it. I contacted Open Doors, hoping to preserve the archive using an old backup, and began importing these works as an Open Doors-approved project in April 2017. Open Doors e-mailed all authors about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact us using the e-mail address on [The Quidditch Pitch collection profile](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/thequidditchpitch/profile).
> 
> **Author's notes:**
> 
> Written for flist-a-fest with the prompt 'Love.'

  
Author's notes: For Fitzette  


* * *

Love was something that Seamus Finnigan never considered much during his first seventeen years. To him, love was the cloying protectiveness of his mother and his father’s somewhat distracted gestures of affection. It meant that you got food lovingly prepared and socks carefully darned and in return, you felt a sense of obligation and duty. Love meant standing up to your best friends in favor of your mother, because that was the way it worked, wasn’t it?

But the love of a best friend was a bit more complicated than that. At first, it seemed simple enough; laughs shared, secrets kept, someone to back you up when a Slytherin tried to dunk you into a toilet. As the years went on, though, it meant loyalty and hard choices. It meant someone to meet your eyes and nod reassuringly when you were scared shitless. It meant someone who you could say anything to but who understood there were times when you just needed them to convince you that everything was going to be ok, even when you both knew it wasn’t.

During his seventh year, however, Seamus really learned about love, learned things about himself and his friend that he hadn’t really wanted to learn. He’d discovered what real terror was; that thing that crushed your chest and stole your breath when a train started moving and not everyone was on board. It was months of dread where you opened up a newspaper every morning certain that you’d see a name in print which meant that your life was going to be shite from that point on. It was countless nights of hot, silent tears soaking your pillow as you allowed yourself to acknowledge that if something happened to him, your heart would never quite work the same way again.

The day he truly learned about love, though, was the day that love killed He-who-must-not-oh-fuck-him-he’s-a-fecking-corpse-now-so-who-cares-what-the-hell-his-name-really-was. Everyone heard Harry’s little speech about love and self-sacrifice and wands and horcruxes (whatever the hell they were.) But Seamus had learned everything he’d ever need to learn about love the moment that Dean walked into the Room of Requirement. Love was when someone’s being alive and whole and close enough to touch meant that everything would be all right in the end.

And that night, Seamus learned a few other things, too. Things that had to do with lips and tongues and cocks and arses and all sorts of glorious ways they could be used when two people loved each other. That was love, too. But that was the fun part, and Seamus reckoned that if you had to put up with all the aching, all the worry, all the give and take that went with loving someone with your whole heart, you deserved a bit of a reward, didn’t you?

* * *

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